Perils of Declarationism

Brad DeLong channels Harry Jaffa in a post about my Declaration item: “Roger B. Taney would agree with Daniel McCarthy–that was, indeed, the point of his Dred Scott decision.” I get off lightly here: when Willmoore Kendall contravened the wisdom of Jaffa, Harry himself said Kendall was practically endorsing Nazism.

Let me decompress a few things. Opposition to slavery is older than the Declaration of Independence, and such opposition can come from a variety of ethical traditions — indeed, any ethical tradition worthy of the name. It’s not the case that absent the Lincoln-Jaffa interpretation of the Declaration, we would not have grounds to oppose human bondage.

But in actual American history, quite apart from the abstract grounds on which one can oppose slavery, didn’t Lincoln’s take on the Declaration lead to emancipation? Only to the extent that it was a boost to Northern morale. Lincoln’s own primary motive in going to war was not to vindicate a philosophy but to preserve the Union, and he was quite clear that he would have compromised on slavery if that might have sufficed to keep the country together. Nor does it seem plausible that abolitionist principle was the main thing driving men to serve in the Army of the Potomac.

The notion that an ideology embedded in the Declaration of Independence was responsible for ending slavery in the United States is simply not true — except, again, to the extent that by manufacturing such an ideology (which Jefferson surely did not implant in the document), Lincoln bolstered the North’s will to prevail. That’s no small thing, but it’s rather less than the Jaffaites insist on.

The benefit to pretending that a high ideal was the motive force in the war is that it makes us feel good about ourselves: Americans can pat themselves on the back knowing that they smashed the evil in their own country and did so in the name of the nation’s original principles. The downside to this myth is that it leads to a lot of delusional behavior in politics and foreign affairs, attributing a saintliness to ourselves that no country possesses.

Understanding that less than idealistic motives can produce even so great a good as ending slavery is an important step toward recognizing the limits of human goodness and perfection. It can also lead to an important recognition of just how much hard work and realism is required to pull off something so important.

Politics does not simply translate pure motives, even the purest, into good results. Motives as mixed as Lincoln’s evidently were can still produce splendid outcomes, while all the good-faith idealism in the world can backfire. Supporting the Iraq War, for example, out of a genuine dedication to the proposition that people everywhere are entitled to self-government would still have been no excuse for facilitating that debacle. Iraqis dead or mutilated as a result of American idealism are no less dead or mutilated than those whose fate was the result of someone’s self-interest.

I recall Christopher Hitchens often using physicist Steven Weinberg’s quote, “With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil—that takes religion.” Really that’s true of high ideals of all kinds — otherwise decent people can be bent to support, even carry out, absolutely heinous acts (torture, for example) in the name of any holy cause, liberty or equality as much as God. And a civil religion, unlike traditional ones in the West today, has an army and a constabulary to back up its self-righteousness.

High ideals have a place in politics, but in the post-Reformation world the plurality of ideals is inescapable, which makes “domestic tranquility” a necessary predicate of any higher goal. That’s why replacing the modest deliberative framework of the Constitution with the soaring hopes of Lincoln’s revision of the Declaration — in all their ambiguous extensions and uncompromising absolutes — is an awful idea.

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13 Responses to Perils of Declarationism

There’s a lot going on in this post, and a lot to agree with, but let me offer just a couple objections or clarifying comments.

“Lincoln’s own primary motive in going to war was not to vindicate a philosophy but to preserve the Union . . .”

Very true: He waged the war as President of the US, not as private-citizen Lincoln. The president’s Constitutional duty, as he saw it, was (at a minimum) to keep the nation from falling apart. He also initially saw no Constitutional powers adhering to the presidency that would allow addressing slavery–a task that was, again initially, politically impossible anyway.

“. . . and he was quite clear that he would have compromised on slavery if that might have sufficed to keep the country together.”

If you mean the door was open for the South to rejoin the union with the status quo ante on slavery, yes; if you mean Constitutional guarantees of slavery’s extension, no. Lincoln believed restricting slavery was condemning it to (a slow) death.

The war was thus also (as your “primary motive” squints at) a war to restore national conditions that he believed set slavery on the path to extinction. Whether he was correct or not, Lincoln believed that that was the founders’ intention, congruent with the Declaration and expressed in the Northwest Ordinance.

While we shouldn’t over-emphasize the role that redefining the purpose of the war at Gettysburg played, we shouldn’t ignore it, either. Many, perhaps most, soldiers fought for anything other than abolition, but many did and many on the home front supported the war when they wouldn’t have if it had not been for that redefinition. Specifically, we should not under estimate the importance of black troops to the Union cause, and I think we know what they were fighting for.

You’re right of course that popular explanations of complex and murky historical processes over-simplify them and turn them into feel-good tales; and that the moral ambiguities embedded even in good and necessary causes are almost always ignored. But that’s more of a complaint against human nature than anything else.

It’s funny how the paleoconservative case against Lincoln comes down to two completely contradictory arguments. First they’ll charge him with being a callous politician who didn’t really want to free the slaves and was too willing to “compromise” with the evil institution of slavery. Then they’ll turn around and accuse him of being a fanatical idealist who ran roughshod over the original meaning of the founding documents in the name of “equality.” How can he be both?

Well, if that were the argument I’m making, it would be easy to say Lincoln was callous on the question of slavery but fanatical about equality as an ideology. There are a lot of fanatics who do not practice what they preach, even if they preach it fervently and with momentous consequences for others.

But that’s not the argument I’m making. First, I wouldn’t call Lincoln callous about slavery: as the comment above notes, he hoped that it was doomed without the prospect of extending to new territory. That’s different from saying ending slavery directly was his rationale for war with the South. (The Founders themselves believed slavery would die out over time, though they were wrong, at least as of the mid-19th century.)

Lincoln’s expansion of the term equality in the Declaration and application of it to the Constitution was about more than slavery; it also tied in with American Whig ideals of national and individual improvement. Lincoln used this as the glue for the war effort and to fortify his re-election campaign; the ideology he powerfully and poetically expressed became something from which a civil religion and new kind of American exceptionalism could be fashioned. The myth itself is what I’m criticizing here, not Lincoln.

There’s nothing “paleoconservative” about this: the impetus for this thread was Jack Rakove’s review of the Tsesis book, in which Rakove notes the historical falsity of the Jaffa line of thinking. My argument is largely my own, though it owes a debt to Willmoore Kendall, who died over a decade before anyone had heard of a paleoconservative.

You will only take my Jaffa away from me when you pry him from my cold, dead hands…

Well, how about Preambleism instead of Declarationism? If you take the Preamble seriously, your “carefully considered and debated Constitution, in all its modesty” seems to say that it is doing a whole bunch of things other than providing a framework of debate to ensure domestic tranquility.

Brad: it depends on how you’re using “paleoconservative.” To some people it means the old National Review circle, but that wasn’t a term anyone used back then. The people who attached the label to themselves in the 1990s, like Paul Gottfried and Sam Francis, are quite different from that generation: Francis notably included Kendall among his “beautiful losers,” which wasn’t intended as a compliment.

Kendall was a complicated figure: he was explicitly not a states’ righter, and while he was no fan of the civil rights movement he considered the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act to be “great conservative victories.” I think your blog post on him mischaracterizes Kendall terribly.He was a Southerner, cantankerous, and hardly in line for any racial-sensitivity awards, but it’s not true that “Where he writes ‘egalitarian reforms’ think ‘letting African-Americans vote.'”

Yet when I read Kendall, the vibe that comes through is that: “Abe Lincoln was a tyrant”.

In some ways, Leo Strauss has poisoned the interpretive well completely. A normal reading of a normal person accepts that there are inconsistencies, contradictions, tensions, and evasions. The problem is that a Straussian reading requires that one take these not as inconsistencies, contradictions, tensions, and evasions but as deliberate messages–and that goes double when reading a Straussian. Thus Harry Jaffa can take Lincoln’s statement that he has not been and is not in favor of the complete amalgamation of the races, note that Lincoln does not say that he never well be in favor of complete amalgamation, and use that to transform Lincoln into a late-twentieth century liberal. In doing so, I think Jaffa is false to who Lincoln was: I think Lincoln was creeped out by the prospect of white-black sex, outraged by slaveholder-on-slave rape, and amused (at least as of 1857) at the possibility of a white man falling in love with evan a partly-Black woman, as captured by his extended mocking of Richard Johson and Julia Chinn in the fourth Lincoln-Douglas debate:

>I do not understand that because I do not want a negro woman for a slave I must necessarily want her for a wife. [Cheers and laughter.] My understanding is that I can just let her alone. I am now in my fiftieth year, and I certainly never have had a black woman for either a slave or a wife. So it seems to me quite possible for us to get along without making either slaves or wives of negroes.

>I will add to this that I have never seen to my knowledge a man, woman or child who was in favor of producing a perfect equality, social and political, between negroes and white men. I recollect of but one distinguished instance that I ever heard of so frequently as to be entirely satisfied of its correctness—and that is the case of Judge Douglas’ old friend Col. Richard M. Johnson. [Laughter.]

>I will also add to the remarks I have made, (for I am not going to enter at large upon this subject,) that I have never had the least apprehension that I or my friends would marry negroes if there was no law to keep them from it, [laughter] but as Judge Douglas and his friends seem to be in great apprehension that they might, if there were no law to keep them from it, [roars of laughter] I give him the most solemn pledge that I will to the very last stand by the law of this State, which forbids the marrying of white people with negroes. [Continued laughter and applause.]

I find it highly ironic that the term used “an end to slavery” continue to find life and breath in our modern world. The emancipation proclamation did not end slavery in America, it just made it illegal and socially reprehensible.

Slavery exist in this country to this very day, it is a modern scourge on humanity. Between human trafficking of sex slaves to the incarceration of entire generations of people to work in the prison furniture factory for slave wages we are presented with many examples of modern day slavery committed by individuals as well we by government.

if we want to be honest about what we did in the past would not a good place to begin be starting with honesty about whee we are ?

I hear the name Leo Strauss brought into this debate a lot, and it does not belong there. Why do so many people, including the estimable M.E. Bradford among others, make that mistake? What’s most interesting about Strauss’s views on Lincoln or the Civil War are…their complete lack of documentation. Jaffa has never published his correspondence with Strauss during the period in which he was working most strenuously on this topic–maybe Strauss told him something he didn’t want to hear?

Looking for the kind of admiration of Lincoln that Strauss shows for Churchill is an exercise in futility; I don’t think he even mentioned his name. The same is true concerning Strauss’s thoughts on slavery: if he condemned it as an unqualified evil, it’s hard to find such a statement anywhere in his corpus. And some indications he leaves actually point the other way, towards a qualified justification if not defense. Indeed, until the late 18th century, there were hardly any political philosophers (including the vaunted Locke) who condemn it except as a misfortune.

Jaffa is a pretentious, abusive hack who sucked up to Strauss in order to attach some philosophic gravitas to a Whig history he hardly invented. He needn’t have dragged Strauss into it, and without Strauss’s work on natural right Jaffa would simply not have had anything to say. Yet all he borrowed was Strauss’s language, not his substance. He got his perspective from what Strauss called the “cave beneath the cave”, which for Jaffa was the Northeast where he grew up. There moral self-congratulation over slavery has been a regional sport ever since the 1830’s for the sons of the millenialist Puritans, whose abolitionism suspiciously did not flourish until after their last slaves were sold South. Following the gradual and compensated emancipation they granted their own slave owners, the North then proceeded to forget the slaves except as a billy-club to beat their Southern political rivals over the head with. And they were happy to take Southern tax revenues for their public works projects, which I suppose had nothing to do with slave-based agriculture; as well as their monopolies that used tariffs to force Southerners to trade with Northern merchants.

I’m absolutely tired of this guy, in case you can’t tell.

That said, this was always an issue for Americans. Like many European intellectuals, Strauss, not having been born in America, did not suffer from the same blinders and consequently avoided the definitely sub-philosophical Lincolnism of the second-raters among his students. Of course they bray on–what else are they capable of?